There are 20+ patent applications up for review by the USPTO right now "involving virtual worlds and different types of credit accounts, charge accounts, escrow transactions, risk mitigation (to name a few) used within these worlds," explained Samuel Weis, who is in charge of reviewing the applications. He reached out to Cornell Professor (and host of Metanomics) Robert Bloomfield for help researching prior art. Bloomfield, in turn, extended the call to Terra Nova. Bloomfield points out that many of the patents seem pretty obvious and may not have much ground to stand on. More importantly, the company behind most of them, Intellectual Ventures (IV), may just be trolling for patents it doesn't intend to use.
"[Founder] and CEO Nathan Myhrvold was CTO of Microsoft prior to forming Intellectual Ventures -- Microsoft was very down on "Patent Trolls" i.e., people with patents that they didn't use, but asserted against others," patent attorney Genie Lyons explained to Bloomfield. "Myhrvold decided the opposite--he took the idea of the patent troll to the n'th degree. IV, as far as I can tell, has no intention of actually using their myriad patents to produce anything, rather their business plan is to assert the patents against those that are making use of the technology--they're 'trolls.'"
Lyons points out that's not necessarily a bad thing, but anyone interested in virtual world economies and economics might be interested in checking out the full descriptions of the patent applications at Terra Nova.
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